epi pen generic-most likely coming out in 2017

musicprnt
Mon, 29 Aug 2016 17:20:34 +0000

No, the CEO is no dummy, but she also is being more than a little bit disgenenuous when she blames the supply chain. There is no doubt that what drug chains charge varies all over the place, and I won’t even say they don’t engage in price gouging. However, that still doesn’t explain Mylan jumping the wholesale price they charge to the levels they have, this has nothing to do with supply chain. The Epi Pen is a mature technology as a delivery system, it was developed a long time ago so the cost of developing it, the cost of getting it past testing, are well in the past, they are sunk costs. Sure, there is a cost to manufacturing the item, there are both fixed and variable costs I would assume, but have their costs gone up that much more? Or did they see a situation where for whatever reason they had a monopoly, and decided to take advantage of it to boost profits?

Synthesizing Epinephrine itself dates back to the turn of the 20th century (a marvelous story recounted in the book “Proof”, the guy who did it had an interesting history, one of the few times the nice guy didn’t get the shaft), so it isn’t like this was some modern miracle drug requiring years of trials and development work the way they would with a new antibiotic or cancer treatment.

So what is their justification, other than taking advantage of people? Most of their cost for the product would be in marketing, packaging and promotion, I have no way of knowing what the cost per unit is, but given what it is, I have to wonder if it is more than a few bucks, given the maturity of the compound and the components of the packaging (a friend of mine who has worked in the pharm industry as a research chemist said he doubted it cost them more than 5 bucks/unit to produce). From what I see, they had a monopoly, no competition, and did what monopolists do, raise prices.

And she may be no dummy, but she also tried the old game of pulling the wool over people’s eyes. When she blamed the supply chain, there was some truth to that, maybe they should have negotiated better prices, but when she said people were not paying any more (then blamed the copays insurance companies put on patients), it leaves out a big cost,that when drug prices go up to insurance companies they end up raising premiums, which in turn ends up with people either paying more, losing insurance or having companies because of the cost of insurance not giving raises. When they raise prices whether the end user sees it or not isn’t the point, someone is absorbing that cost, and drugs are a big part of the cost of health care.